The new Carly Rae Jepsen album is actually fantastic

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LemonMelon

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I wasn't expecting to say this, but Carly Rae Jepsen's new album is one of the best pure pop albums of the decade. No, really, the whole thing is fucking great. No filler. There isn't a song that isn't perfectly executed and imbued with great vocals and personality. On top of that, it branches out into some very successful 80s revival sounds. It's like Call Me Maybe meets Haim meets Kaputt. Top notch production.

For me, it's right up there with 20/20 Experience Part 1, Beyonce's self-titled and The Fame Monster as one of those awesome pop records that I wasn't expecting to enjoy but wound up very surprised. Please buy it or listen to it on your streaming service of choice. Critics are really digging it too, 79 metascore right now.

A few of the great singles from it:







Run Away With Me is one of the best songs of the year, hands down.
 
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Gonna have to listen to this over the weekend. Run Away With Me is one of the best pop songs I've heard all year. Light years better than I Really Like You.
 
Had to think for a minute or so about who she is, and then I remembered.

Very glowing reviews.

I'll try it, maybe.


Sent from a barge floating through the docks of Dublin
 
Gonna have to listen to this over the weekend. Run Away With Me is one of the best pop songs I've heard all year. Light years better than I Really Like You.

While saying that I enjoy every track on the album, and I'm very serious about that, I will also say that I Really Like You isn't terribly representative of the album and is one of the weaker tracks overall. It's like Call Me Maybe without the jubilant strings that put that song over the top for me.
 
Finally, I can be in style or something. I've been living in a cave (metaphorically) when it comes to music and listening to Stone Roses and the Smiths for a while
 
Wow that is super high praise. I feel like you are nearly talking just to me with your comparisons haha. I was thinking about listening to it because I enjoyed the first or second single, whatever it was, and even though you get the kudos here I am claiming the overall title as I think I posted it first ;)
 
Wow that is super high praise. I feel like you are nearly talking just to me with your comparisons haha. I was thinking about listening to it because I enjoyed the first or second single, whatever it was, and even though you get the kudos here I am claiming the overall title as I think I posted it first ;)

Yeah, you posted All That in RMT months ago. But it got Best New Track first. :wink:


Listen and report back.
 
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I feel like you are nearly talking just to me with your comparisons haha.
Ha mentioning Kaputt is the perfect cobbler bait. It works for me as well.

Not sure if I've heard the new singles but Call Me Maybe is fantastic so I'll definitely give this a listen. Right now actually.
 
It's free to listen on the browser version of Spotify. Just going to have a few ads along the way.
 
The songs are too samey for my tastes...there's some of the best pop singles of the year sitting on this record though and I'll have fun listening to them in my digital library when someone uploads the inevitable torrent of Pitchfork's Top Songs of 2015, for example. But sitting through the entire album is a chore.
 
That's why I don't listen to the deluxe, although a lot of people seem to not mind it. 12 tracks, 45 minutes of this is absolutely perfect for me.

And now universal critical praise of this record is confirmed: strong 7/10 from Death Grips-loving punk rock fan Anthony Fantano. :lol: waiting on that A from Robert Christgau so we can get Laz on board.
 
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Listened to a few of these tracks - I'd say the potential is there, but they would be much better served by a more able vocalist. Put Jessie Ware on them and you have some killer songs.
 
This stuff is beneath Ware...her arrangements/lyrics don't all follow the same pattern like this album does. I agree though that Jepsen just doesn't have enough of an interesting voice to really carry the thing, but she does have talent and her sound suits some of the songs quite well.

Any given sub-genre usually only has a handful of records worth noticing in a given year, so this is definitely one of the best straight-ahead pop LPs of 2015. I can certainly understand the praise.
 
I do believe that Devotion is my favorite pop album of the decade so far, and honestly I hesitate to even pin it down as such, there's a great deal of variety and atmosphere at play there. I've heard all of Jessie Ware's work, I've seen her live at a very small venue...she's the real deal.

But I think CRJ has something here too. I think she has a great personality (if not a defined persona like Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift) and a voice that suits the material. Plus really killer production and a defined sound that she could own on future records. For now, this is something of a one off, but as she distances herself from her early work this may be the sound she gravitates toward.
 
OK im so embarrassed to say this but I might like her album genuinely because of catchy-ness. i mean what's wrong with recent pop songs that aren't catchy? what the fuck?
 
I enjoy this, I don't know that I'd use the word "Fantastic" to describe it. But I think she beat Destroyer at the saxophone game :wink:.
 
Count me in.

I listened to the deluxe version, which did wear a bit thin by the end. And I do feel that I Really Like You is one of the weakest songs. But damn, Run Away With Me, the title track, Boy Problems, and Let's Get Lost, to name a handful, are just infectious.

I also went back and acquired Madonna's first two albums, which I had on cassette way back when but never owned on CD and hadn't heard in a long time. There really isn't much difference between Madonna and CRJ if we're only going to judge the recordings in a vacuum. It's straight up pop bliss. Madonna had the persona to push her material to another level, but she's really one of a kind in that regard. The actual material pre-True Blue isn't that special in terms of the tracks themselves.

Emotion is better than anything Britney Spears ever released, that's for sure.
 
She's back.

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Queen Carly delivered again. This is a great set of new tracks.

Being a very album-centric listener, I wish she had just released Emotion in its standard form initially and saved those bonus tracks for this so we could have had two full albums a year apart. That's OK, I can just make a playlist out of them.
 
And here is that playlist, a combination of the original tracks from Emotion deluxe and Side B, sequenced into a coherent album:

1. First Time
2. Body Language
3. Higher
4. Fever
5. Store
6. Cry
7. I Didn't Just Come Here to Dance
8. Black Heart
9. The One
10. Love Again
11. Roses
12. Never Get to Hold You
13. Favorite Colour

It'll make for a nice break whenever you want to listen to some CRJ but don't want to get burned out on Emotion.
 
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